Back then, it's fair to say I had not yet bought in to the MCU. It was still possible to greet new movies with a shake of the head and an upturn of the nose. It was still possible to say "Yet another movie made from a comic book? When is this going to end?"
Now that I know where it was destined to end, I am on board retroactively.
It's kind of similar to my feelings about Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which I didn't like when I first saw it. The next two movies won me over big time and now I have a strong sense of affection for the original.
The occasion for this reckoning with Doctor Strange was watching it again on Friday night with my ten-year-old son. His younger brother was spending the night over at their aunt's house, so my wife got the idea to order burgers to be delivered (since the younger one doesn't eat them) and watch a movie that might be a tad too old for the six-year-old. We're still basking in the newness of our Disney+ so were obviously drawn there. I suggested the original X-Men from 2000, as my older son is obsessed with Wolverine due to his recent insertion in Fortnite, but my wife preferred something she hadn't already seen. So we landed on Doctor Strange, which would make my son's second MCU movie after Captain Marvel on his birthday a month ago. (Exactly a month ago, as it happens.)
They both really liked it. In fact, it is now my son's favorite movie -- supplanting Captain Marvel. Ah, to be at an age when all your favorite movies are still ahead of you.
I liked it a lot better, too. More than that, though, I find it hard to really remember why I disliked it to the extent that I did. I gave it only two stars on Letterboxd. I spoke quite negatively about it on a podcast devoted to it. I could go back and listen to that podcast to hear the opinions of a version of me that is not yet four years old, but to be honest, I don't want to spend the time.
Doctor Strange -- the character, not the movie -- has been to a lot of really good places since then, which could explain why I suddenly feel so much better about him. And that brings me to the second occasion for my reckoning with this right now.
As you may or may not know, I've been playing catch-up for some time in adding all the movies I've seen to Flickchart, the movie-ranking site where you duel movies against each other and steadily build a list of favorites over time. A few years back I decided it would be better to wait a month after seeing a movie before I ranked it, to let the recency bias wear off before I decided where it belonged on the list. Well, that created the conditions for me to neglect adding my movies entirely, and suddenly, I was two years -- which is about 500 movies -- behind. It's now been three or four years since I've actually been caught up.
But the pandemic has helped me get closer, and now I am "only" about 14 months behind. If I keep at it, I should catch up soon.
The key to that 14-month time period is that I have now added the most recent movie released in the MCU, Spider-Man: Far From Home. (We'd have Black Widow by now, and I wouldn't have added it to Flickchart yet, but the release has been pushed back to next May.) That means that Flickchart can tell me my rankings of all 23 MCU films, from first to 23rd. And that I can now tell you them. Such a momentous thing might warrant its own post, yet I now have my qualms about some of the films I so easily dismissed when I was still an MCU denier.
So I will just quickly list them ... as "quickly" as you can list 23 films I guess:
1. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) - 457/5319 (91%)
2. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) - 586/5319 (89%)
3. Avengers: Endgame (2019) - 665/5319 (87%)
4. Captin America: The Winter Soldier (2014) - 759/5319 (86%)
5. Captain America: Civil War (2016) - 1018/5319 (81%)
6. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) - 1323/5319 (75%)
7. Iron Man (2008) - 1498/5319 (72%)
8. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) - 1611/5319 (70%)
9. The Avengers (2012) - 1712/5319 (68%)
10. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) - 2024/5319 (62%)
11. Black Panther (2018) - 2037/5319 (62%)
12. Captain Marvel (2019) - 2251/5319 (58%)
13. Iron Man 3 (2013) - 2764/5319 (48%)
14. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) - 2919/5319 (45%)
15. Thor: The Dark World (2013) - 3018/5319 (43%)
16. Ant-Man (2015) - 3375/5319 (37%)
17. The Incredible Hulk (2008) - 3403/5319 (36%)
18. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) - 3498/5319 (34%)
19. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - 3661/5319 (31%)
20. Iron Man 2 (2010) - 4075/5319 (23%)
21. Thor (2011) - 4222/5319 (21%)
22. Doctor Strange (2016) - 4374/5319 (18%)
23. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) - 4409/5319 (17%)
Digesting this list for the first time, I can see plenty of placement errors -- small ones (I definitely don't like Iron Man better than Captain America: The First Avenger) and what are probably major ones (the original Thor surely will no longer feel like my third worst MCU movie now that I've loved Ragnarok so much). That's the nature of something like Flickchart, where a movie can only jump up on the list if it gets the right duels, unless you purposely re-rank it. And I may indeed have some purposeful re-ranking in my future.
But I suspect a lot of these movies need to be seen again and appreciated for where they stand in the thrust toward Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Age of Ultron may require that in the extreme.
For the purposes of our discussion of Doctor Strange, though, I noticed something interesting which I will phrase in the form of a question:
"What do the top three movies on this list -- Avengers: Infinity War, Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame -- all have in common?"
There are actually a number of correct answers to this question: Thor, the Hulk, Valkyrie, Loki, Korg ... the list probably goes on. But the relevant answer today is that they all feature Doctor Strange.
So my guess is, as Doctor Strange became increasingly central to the fates of the Avengers, he came to seem less like the star of a side project that arrived at a time when I didn't want to meet any new Marvel characters. Watching Doctor Strange today, I can see it as the origin story of the guy who figured out how to see all possible futures and find the one way of beating Thanos.
Now, shedding my status as an MCU denier does not mean that I automatically embrace anything new that comes out of the MCU. I was lower on both Black Panther and Captain Marvel than some people, and the latest Spider-Man is correctly ranked as at only 34% on my total chart. In fact, it probably should be lower on the Marvel list, as some of those movies -- Doctor Strange in particular -- should be higher. But as my most recently seen and my most recently ranked film, Spider-Man: Far From Home clearly shows that it takes more than just the Marvel Studios logo at the beginning of the movie to win praise from me.
What has clearly changed, and what has been changing since the second Captain America movie, is my ability to dismiss these movies as "just some comic book movie." In fact, the directon the MCU has gone has so thoroughly convinced me of its validity that it seems hard to believe I was ever snobbishly waving them off. It's hard to remember there was a time when we couldn't see the grand design, and thought that each new movie was made just to make money. Of course, they were made just to make money ... but you can't have such narrative cohesiveness and intricacy without a genuine love for the material as well.
I wouldn't say that I love Doctor Strange now myself, but I do think it deserves one of those purpose-driven re-ranks, which I will now give it post-haste.
Okay, back from that. It is now 2394/5319 (55%), which would jump it from 22nd all the way up to 13th on my MCU list.
You could indict recency bias for this new placement and call it an over-correction, if you want to use my own logic against me. But an incorrectly placed movie on Flickchart really does need to be dealt with sooner rather than later. When placing a film for the first time, you need to rely on the placement of every movie it comes up against if you want to be sure this new movie will land in the right spot. A film should not be dueling against the likes of Christmas With the Kranks and Live Free or Die Hard -- Strange's former neighbors on my chart -- only to then get stomped by the superior sorcerer who can conjure circular portals that can take him anywhere in the multiverse.
Thirteenth may be too high for it among the MCU movies ... but that just tells me I've probably got more re-ranking to do.
And with Disney+, and a couple of children eager to dive further into the MCU, something tells me I'll have the opportunity, too.
In fact, we've already got our next candidate. That's Ant-Man, which has been deemed suitable for the younger one, and which might have been watched as soon as this weekend if we hadn't just watched Doctor Strange. Given how much I love Ant-Man and the Wasp, I suspect this will be a riser, too.
My younger one has already said he wants to see a movie with Groot in it, so it looks like a long path is being laid out before us. Which is fine by me, because my days as an MCU denier are ancient history.
No comments:
Post a Comment